


Find Another Word

by kinaesthetic



Series: Satya Vent-Fics [1]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Autistic Satya "Symmetra" Vaswani, Canon Autistic Character, Gen, jamison learns some lessons about words that he uses, minor background characters - Freeform, satya takes a stand even it doesn't go perfectly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-04
Updated: 2017-06-04
Packaged: 2018-11-08 22:30:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11091255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kinaesthetic/pseuds/kinaesthetic
Summary: Satya stands up for herself.





	Find Another Word

**Author's Note:**

> I've had this idea in my mind since before Autism Acceptance Month (April) but I never got around to writing it. Got a burst of inspiration, so here we go!

Satya loves words. 

Ever since she was very young, she had taken great fascination in words of all languages, absorbing her native Telugu alongside the Hindi, Urdu, and English prevalent in those around her childhood home. As she grew older, she continued collecting languages as she pleased: Arabic, Mandarin, Tagalog, Bengali. As an adolescent, Vishkar encouraged her to learn a variety of Western languages, having noticed her talent. Her Spanish is excellent, her Portuguese is reasonable, her French passable, Russian minimal. She practices and speaks in all the languages she can, striving to reach the same level of precise speech that she employs in Telugu, Hindi, Urdu, and English.

Her teammates sometimes tease her for the way she talks, though only jokingly. They know her surgical word choice and deadpan voice is just part of who she is. No one ever asks why and that suits her just fine normally. There are times where she does want to speak up but she worries that the greater part of Overwatch will not accept her opinions so easily as they do in other forums so she stays quiet.

Listens.

Thinks.

Overthinks.

If anyone has noticed her discretely stimming with her hard light projections during meetings, they have not mentioned it. If anyone has noticed her eating one of the same twelve foods at each meal, no one has said so. If anyone noticed the heavy blanket she drags to movie night for herself, they haven’t pointed it out. No says anything about her favorite seat at the dining table, her pre-battle routines, her dancing in the studio for hours and hours after terrible missions, the way she wanders at night fixing photographs and realigning door hinges, her perfect turret formations that sometimes cost them precious minutes in the field or how she refuses to be touched more often than not. No one seems to mind when she goes on and on about hard light or bodily autonomy or the evolution of self-propelled vehicles over time. But, to Satya, she feels obvious.

Perhaps they are all too polite to mention it.

Perhaps they do not care.

Perhaps they truly are oblivious.

She is reasonably sure that Angela knows. After all, Vishkar never once lost an opportunity to flaunt her as a treasure or a liability. They documented every shutdown, meltdown, nonverbal episode, and unsubtle stimming that she ever did, tallying up her “problem symptoms” against her, forcing her to retreat deep inside of herself in order to excel under their watchful eye. She had seen the bright red stamp on the first page of her file before: autism. Once, in a rare act of defiance, she snuck into the records with a hardlight copy of the nurse’s file cabinet key. She’d crossed out “autism” and written “autistic” underneath it in her own precise lettering. Even from under the thumb of Vishkar, she knew an adjective is more proper than a noun. At only fourteen, she’d reasoned that if they stopped using a noun, they would also stop trying to separate her from it, stop trying to cure her. Of course, she’d been caught when she flipped to the dozens of other pages detailing her “problem episodes” and sunk to the floor, frozen and horrified by the cruel way in which the nurses described her since adolescence. They’d reinforced the records room with biometrics and the next time Satya saw a glimpse of her file, the bright red ‘autism’ stamp was back, her own lettering gone. Those medical records were no doubt assimilated into those of Overwatch via some clever hacking. She doubts Angela would have left them unsealed, seeing as though it would be impractical to trust her to tell the truth as an ex-agent of a questionable corporation.

That was six months ago. Satya graduated from uneasy collaborator to trusted teammate to comfortably acquainted with the rest of Overwatch. She’s gone from holed up in her room when they were not on missions, to cooking with the team to having regular movie nights with them, such as tonight.

Six months ago, she would have ignored Jamison’s exclamation, winced, and burrowed underneath her blanket. Six months ago, she would have simply dug her fingernails into her thigh until she stopped thinking about his words. Six months ago, she certainly would not be standing next to the light switch, trying to ignore the tightness in her chest, and staring Jamison down with a flat expression.

He looks around he rest of the room, who’s blinking sleepily at the sudden light. Mei scrambles for the remote until Zarya reaches out and grabs it from the table for her. The climatologist pauses the movie and mutes the television, then leans back into the Russian’s embrace to look up at Satya. Lena, Jesse, Angela, Mako, and Genji all look up at her with varying levels of concern.

“What?” Jamison cocks his head to the side.

Satya blinks, her eyebrows furrowing. Perhaps in her rush to address the issue, she’d slipped into another language. “My apologies, perhaps I was not speaking English. I said you need to find another word.”

“I heard you the first time, mate. But are we watching the same movie? Bloke’s a right idiot!”

“Then say as much.” Satya clips her words so short that they barely sound monosyllabic but she’s running out of poise for her explanation. When she’d shot to her feet and strode over to the light switch, she was intending on making a point, not to engage in a long argument. She wants to bolt but she forces herself to remain planted, facing the teammates before her, all of whom have their eyes on her. She stares him down, daring him to argue until she’s finished speaking.

“You cannot use autistic as an insult. It’s imprecise. It’s disrespectful. It’s detrimental. There are other words you can use to say what you mean, Jamison. Surely you can find another.” In all her life, she has never found a shortage of words. At least in her brain, sometimes her tongue has other ideas about speaking, but they don't need to hear that right now. She waits.

Jamison frowns, chewing on his lip. “Uh...sorry? I didn’t mean to upset you, Satya.”

“I am not _upset-_ ” She breaks off, feeling tears spill down her cheeks unbidden. She doesn’t understand at what point she’d gone from determined to distraught, especially in front of all of them. Mortified, she turns on heel and exits the room without another word, making it back to her room on autopilot. There she paces, deepening the rut already in her carpet, muttering under her breath every description of the recent proceedings that she can think of: _unsightly, poorly scripted, badly planned, undignified, embarrassing, overly emotional, out of control_. Satya makes her way through every language she knows, adding self-criticisms as she paces until Athena alerts that someone is at her door.

She stops, frozen and staring at the door. Rather than force herself to deal with a conversation face to face, she opens the voice channel.

“Satya, it’s Jamie. You left your blanket…”he pauses and she can imagine him squirming. “Plus I didn’t get to say I’m sorry properlike.”

She pauses, pleased that Jamison has returned it but also distressed at the thought of someone else touching it. She shouldn’t have left it behind. She digs her fingernails into her thigh; her mind flooding with cursing.

“I apologize for leaving so abruptly.” Each word comes out smoothly but only because she’s switched to fidgeting with the joints of her prosthetic for concentration. “That was incredibly rude of me to do so.”

“Probably better that you did. Had quite the conversation with the rest of the team. Imagine I woulda just upset you more with what I said. I’m not the brightest bulb in the socket.” Satya slides to the floor beneath the intercom. Her mind runs wild with thoughts of what _that_ conversation could have been like.

“Is that so?”

“Yeah. Got the gist now though. Stupid people’re stupid. Autistic don’t mean stupid, means autistic. Usin’ it to mean stupid hurts autistic people. Right?”

“Yes. Yes, that’s correct.” She breathes deeply, glad he doesn’t sound dismissive. It’s a simple explanation, but it will do. She doesn’t feel like explaining in depth right now.

“I’m sorry, Satya. Didn’t mean to hurt ya; I won’t be doing it again.”

“I am happy to accept your apology, Jamison.”

“Right. Glad ta hear it then.” He pauses, she can hear him squirming through the voice channel. “Are ya coming back to movie night?”

With the way her legs feel like jelly, she doesn’t think she could make to her bed right now, which is five feet away, much less back to the entertainment room and back.

“I will turn in early tonight, I believe.” She hopes her voice does not come off as standoffish, but sometimes there’s simply no helping it.

There’s a gentle thump. “I’ll leave your blanket out here then. Night, Satya.”

“Good night, Jamison.”

She waits until the sound of his unmatched gait fades from the voice channel before closing it and having Athena open the door so she can grab her blanket. A faint whiff of gasoline and smoke reaches her nose and she scowls. It’s going on the clothesline to air out first thing in the morning, but it’s a small price to pay for someone gaining some understanding. Not to mention knowing that the rest of the team backed her up and understood, even if she wasn’t there to witness it. The thought brings a small smile to her face.

Exhausted, she gets to her feet, staggers over to her bed and burrows deep into her covers. As her mind struggles to calm down for the night, she tries to name the warm feeling in her chest as she considers the outcome of the night. It’s replaced the dread of misunderstandings and embarrassment, but for all the languages she speaks, Satya finds there’s not exactly a name for what she’s feeling right now.

**Author's Note:**

> -i found out satya is autistic like the day after i bought overwatch (it's the only reason i ever clicked her portrait. turns out im pretty good with her) so thanks blizzard for giving me a character that i can relate to.  
> -why do you think that character is autistic? do you know how nice it is to just say "because the creators said so" instead of having to make a gd list  
> -mostly unrelated side note: fuck autism $peaks. they don't speak for me.  
> -identity first language or bust (autistic person, not person with autism)  
> -nothing's wrong with autistic people. gotta fight my coworkers on this a little too much on this.  
> -satya's braver than me.  
> -i have nothing against junkrat! just to be clear.


End file.
